Walnut Circle Grill Not a real fine dining restaurant, just a front for drug trafficking. Hattiesburg, Mississippi

If you are looking for Causual Fine Dining in Hattiesburg, MS, you may need to look farther than the Walnut Circle Grill.  The restaurant claims that some items are "fresh", when in fact, they are premade, frozen, and delivered by Cisco.  Frozen steaks that are near their expiration date are commonly joked about as "aged" by the kitchen staff.  The day before some foods expire, they are relabelled so that they appear to expire a week later.  This is intentionally done in case there is a surprise health inspection.  If the items are not relabelled, they are used in the "Soup of the Day" along with leftover buffett food from private parties.  Frozen meats, such as chicken and shrimp, are thawed in a sink, and are sometimes left there for the rest of the shift, about 5 hours.  I have never eaten meat here that tasted "right".  Whatever you do, don't go there within an hour before closing, or your food will be mishandled reguardless.

The food is extremely overpriced, under the guise of "fine dining."  You may expect that from a restaurant that employs a chef who is "a notable enthusiast for bold experiences in both food and life," and whose "culinary skills have taken him around the world".  But the "chef" on their web-site is actually the owner, and he is almost never there, and when he is, he doesn't actually cook any food.

The "chef" that cooks the main dishes is a drug addict with no real experience, that gets most of his "specialty" dishes from online recipe sites.  He is very rude and thinks his kitchen should function like a reality-TV cooking show.  He is dirty, with long dreadlocks, and commonly handles drugs such as marijuana, prescription pills, and speed throughout the shift.  Everyone he has hired, is someone who can get him a different type of drug, or who buys drugs from him, and they work together to stay high the whole shift.  If you don't fit that profile, he gets rid of you.  You can witness this yourself by waiting around back and watching as employees come out of the back door and go into the alley or behind the dumpster, one or two at a time, to use the drugs.

He has yelled at the rest of the kitchen staff, on multiple occasions, for throwing things away that have been dropped on the floor.  His preferred solution is to "throw it back on the grill for a few more minutes."  He also prefers to wash his hands in a sanitary bucket, where knives are kept, rather than using a sink.  This of course, contaminates the knives and everything they touch.  

The wait staff is managed separately, but he constantly makes sexist remarks and gestures about the waitresses.  He is also an outspoken atheist, and mocks the religious employees behind their backs.

All of this amounts to a bad dining experience, and an even worse working environment.